Tagging/Social Bookmarking - an educational perspective

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Uses of Social Bookmarking in Education


  • Network with other educators around the globe who share your interests.
  • Create social bookmark accounts for your school's academic departments. Teachers within the department all contribute to the growing database of web resources.
  • Contact other people for professional networking, based on their social bookmarks.
  • Allow yourself and your students to share bookmarks on research topics.
  • Subscribe to someone's bookmarks via RSS and receive updates whenever they add new websites.
  • Collaborate on projects with other schools, sharing bookmarks between all participating communities.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

(from 7 Things you should know about…Social Bookmarking http://educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf)

Tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources among peers or students.

How can it be integrated into teaching and learning?


Using Social Bookmarking in the Classroom
As an educational tool, bookmarking sites can help students to find ways to search for information other than Google indexing. Students who use these sites will also be less likely to lose links that they have found valuable. Why use social bookmarking in the classroom?
  1. Classroom Management
    Students and teachers can move from one computer to another and still have full access to their bookmarks. Students and teachers will be less likely to forget the location of the sites they have used.
  2. Collaboration
    Students can share their bookmarks with their classmates. Students and teachers can also share collections of bookmarks they have found to be worthwhile.
  3. News Gathering
    Social bookmarking sites can also help students to quickly find links to important current events and historical events. Some bookmarking sites allow students to subscribe to news feeds on a particular subject of interest. They can then go daily to this site to find the most current news on the subject.

Check out this link to a discussion on ways to use use tagging in Education

http://education.ning.com/forum/topics/1027485:Topic:34026?page=1&commentId=1027485%3AComment%3A39203&x=1#1027485Comment39203

Here is a lesson plan that outlines how social bookmarking can be introduced and used in the classroom

http://wiki.classroom20.com/Social+Bookmarks+Lesson+Plansexternal image moz-screenshot-1.jpg

Useful educational links:


Delicious is a free social bookmarking tool that was voted #1 in the "Top 100 Tools for Learning" in the U.K in 2008 http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100.html

Another popular site is http://ma.gnolia.com. This site has a more attractive interface and is more readable. It also has page rankings and some other advanced features. On the other hand, ma.gnolia.com is not as fast in the process of tagging a page, and the community is not as large as del.icio.us.


Here is a user-friendly introduction about how social bookmarking works with special focus on Delicious:

Here is a slideshare presentation highlighting social bookmarking for teachers that has some useful links.